What to stream: realisations of a n00b streamer

When you start streaming, the natural inclination is to stream the games you like or love playing, or even games that are insanely popular on Twitch such as Valorant, Grand Theft Auto 5, League of Legends, Minecraft etc.. And this would be fine, as long as you don’t care about your chances to grow your followers or community being shit-outta-luck. And it took playing Shell Shockers for me to realise this as it became week-on-week now the ONLY growth I’ve had in followers & engagement thus far.

I played OverWatch this evening, & for over an hour, zero new views, zero new followers & zero engagements. And why would ANYONE when you take a quick look at the OverWatch category on Twitch at any given time & see just how many people are live, have engagements & realise your channel is so far down the list, it is in the ‘too-far-to-scroll-down-who-gives-a-shit’ sector of the OverWatch category.

I didn’t get down or frustrated about it. Instead, I started thinking about what has worked so far for me. Shell Shockers is an insanely silly game where decorated eggs with guns run around breaking each other open to reveal yokes splattered all over a small map. This week alone, I grew an additional 8 followers, & had 18 people in my stream at one point, & had 6 of those in-game with me in the lobby I was playing in.

I looked at the analytics — I was in the first few rows of ShellShockers streamers at the time I was on. The reason is, ShellShockers has a relatively small amount of people streaming it at any one time, & especially for the times I stream at, so I had people find me easily.

So, then I came across this video on YouTube tonight, & it kinda confirmed what I’d figured out. So the end result is, I’ll just no longer be streaming Krunker, or OverWatch, or Hearthstone. This is fine because I can still enjoy these games in non-streaming time, but it does mean ShellShockers & EV.io are going to be two of the games I do stream weekly, with Thursday being a day I can for the next while try out different browser-based games in the low-streamer-decent following range that I find interesting, & should any of these interest me, it’ll be another set of things to test to see which I really like playing & which get traction.

Does it mean I’ll never stream Krunker/WoW/OverWatch/Hearthstone again? No. It just means, for now, these games will not provide a reasonable opportunity to grow my community & following, & it also buys me some time until I can get newer hardware to really support those games & a following to go with them. And the best part of all of this is, it provide a great learning experience for me with Streaming, engagement & for finding what will work for me.